it was not so bad as
death, yet, when she thought of this to console herself, the tears
rolled all the faster. She took the end of the red cotton kerchief
tied over her head, and wiped them away; for the furrows in her face
did not merely run up and down--they ran in all directions, and
carried her tears all over her face at once. She could understand
death, but she could not understand this.

It came about in this way: Anne Marie and she lived in the little
red-washed cabin against which she leaned; had lived there alone with
each other for fifty years, ever since Jeanne Marie's husband had died,
and the three children after him, in the fever epidemic.

The little two-roomed cabin, the stable where there used to be a cow,
the patch of ground planted with onions, had all been bought and paid
for by the husband; for he was a thrifty, hard-working Gascon, and had
he lived there would not have been one better off, or with a larger
family, either in that quarter or in any of the red-washed
suburbs with which Gascony has surrounded New Orleans. His women,
however,--the wife and sister-in-law,--had done their share in the
work: a man's share apiece, for with the Gascon women there is no
discrimination of sex when it comes to work.

And they worked on just the same after he died, tending the cow,
digging, hoeing, planting, watering. The day following the funeral, by
daylight Jeanne Marie was shouldering around the yoke of milk-cans to
his patrons, while Anne Marie carried the vegetables to market; and so
on for fifty years.

They were old women now,--seventy-five years old,--and, as they
expressed it, they had always been twins. In twins there is always one
lucky and one unlucky one: Jeanne Marie was the lucky one, Anne Marie
the unlucky one. So much so, that it was even she who had to catch the
rheumatism, and to lie now bedridden, months at a time, while Jeanne
Marie was as active in her sabots as she had ever been.

In spite of the age of both, and the infirmity of one, every Saturday
night there was some little thing to put under the brick in the
hearth, for taxes and license, and the never-to-be-forgotten funeral
provision. In the husband's time gold pieces used to go in, but they
had all gone to pay for the four funerals and the quadrupled doctor's
bill. The women laid in silver pieces; the coins, however, grew
smaller and smaller, and represented more and more not so much the
gain from onions as the saving from f